Volume 42, Number 18 · November 16, 1995
Heroes and Hero Worship
By Joan Acocella
Mosaic: Memoirs
by Lincoln Kirstein
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 270 pp., $25.00
Following Balanchine
by Robert Garis
Yale University Press, 260 pp., $30.00
One day in 1929, in a coincidence that he later took as a sign, the young Lincoln Kirstein walked into a church in Venice and stumbled on Serge Diaghilev's funeral. Diaghilev had rescued Western ballet from near-extinction; without him, as Kirstein understood, the future of the art was in doubt. 'It is hard to convey the feeling of loss one has, having seen [ballet], fearing never to see it again,' he wrote in 1930. 'It is exactly the same as if one were deprived of a literature, a whole language of expression; for instance to wake up one morning and know one could never read Tolstoy or Proust or Shakespeare again.'
Review, 6753 words
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